The Design and Application of an Automatic Course Generation System for Large-Scale Education

In China, the number of online learners who attend formal education has quadrupled in the last 5 years to 8.2 millions until the end of 2008. How can online teachers build and update web-courses for such a large numbers of online students - courses that ideally respect the different requirements of the students? In this paper we describe an automatic course generation System (ACGS) developed at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). In this ACGS, teachers can build web-based courses according to their own instructional plan and publish the web-based courses without requiring technological support. Teachers can also update the web-courses whenever the instructional objective changes. The web-course learning environment generated from this system takes into account pedagogical scenarios. The ease of use of our system is illustrated by its quickly increasing number of users. About 50 teachers in the SJTU School of Continuing Education (SOCE-SJTU) have developed 45 web-courses in only two months. These 45 web-courses have been provided to about 5800 online learners in the last 2009 autumn semester alone.